Much of what’s disclosed in Filmwad’s Top Ten Lies Blockbuster Video Tells Their Customers can be said of a host of other pay-your-way-though-college restaurant or retail chains. The “sorry, the restroom is broken” line was a particular favorite in a previous line of work years ago, in response to countless unspeakable acts – but there’s something in the language (excerpted below), written in such squinty-eyed contempt towards all that is milquetoast and whitewashed that you can just about taste the bile – that speaks to my inner curmudgeon.

“As mentioned earlier, Blockbuster employees, for the most part, know next to nothing about movies. As such, their recommendations will be at best useless and at worst harmful: whichever new release has the prettiest cover will likely be the one immediately recommended by the manager on duty.

On the other hand, the vast majority of those who frequent the shelves of Blockbuster Video are slobbering, slack-jawed idiots who harbor no true love for cinema, no desire to probe deep questions about life, and no ability to enjoy something that might require the slightest bit of effort.“

Anxiously awaiting dispatches from ticked-off ticket-takers and popcorn-peddlers to add to the mix.

6 Responses

I haven’t worked at Blockbuster or any home video rental shop for that matter but I have worked at Gamestop and that top ten list could very much substitute for Gamestop.

The young and average customers, mostly 14 and under, were just tasteless brats while the adult customers were cheap and moronic. The highest selling items were the cheap-ass, five to ten dollar used games that no one would ever spent more than three lazy hours completing and then use as ash-trays.

The company’s policies were arbitrary and often ridiculous and the employees were thieves gossip mongers, and clueless.

I spent three months working at that resentful, mundane, uninteresting place and quit after finally letting the gathering steam inside blow-out on a douchebag co-worker who just had it coming.

I worked at Blockbuster in Austin, TX for 4 years through high school. Only half of those facts are true. I always called the other store to check availability of titles, I studied film history and received a BS in Film from UT but knew nearly as much as I did then, if the restroom is out of order it’s because a customer has taken such a large dump that we have to wait to clean it after we close, I’ve never told any one they couldn’t rent 5 minutes before midnight but it’s a fact that the POS system won’t let you rent anything to anyone after 12:00am.
I’m not trying to defend the company or it’s policies. I’d merely like to address the fact that in my 4 years, I had ice-cream sandwiches thrown at me by grandfathers, been called everything in the book by mothers of 5, etc, and witnessed first-hand the inability of the customer to separate the company from the human beings that work there. Wage-slaves controlled by policy so they receive another paycheck don’t make up rules to make other people’s lives harder, at least nobody I worked with did. It’s a bit of a strange and compelling sociological experiment to see a base of customers of one store, seemingly coming from several different demographic positions, all joined in an unanalyzed mob opinion of the imagined amalgam of the cult of Blockbuster and it’s diabolical droogs. It’s like something out of a movie.

Oh yeah, I also tackled a kid running out of my store with a couple dvds shoved in his shorts. We called the cops on him.

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